When CETA was legislated out of existence, Balance of State staff, led by Kathleen McElroy, Program Manager for Planning and Evaluation, decided to preserve some of CETA's history by tape recording the recollections of staff, grantees, participants, employers, county board chairpersons, “and other interested old CETA hands.” Sixty-five oral history interviews, totaling approximately forty-five hours, were collected. Also included as part of the collection are two tapes of public hearings on the CETA program. The first of these, held in 1980 in Eau Claire, is mainly a series of people giving testimony about how they had been helped by CETA. The second, held in 1982 in La Crosse, consists of two parts: 1) staff explaining in a question and answer session how the La Crosse area Youth-in-School program was being cut, and 2) testimony from high school students and others about how the program had helped them and why it should not be cut.
State Historical Society staff provided an orientation at the launching of the Oral History Project on September 7, 1983. Facing an October 1, 1983, deadline, several CETA staff members proceeded to complete most of the interviews within the next three weeks. They worked from a set of general instructions and from several sets of general questions, geared to particular types of interviewees. The instructions and questions are included in the first folder of the finding aids.
The interviewers were generally inexperienced and untrained as oral historians. The interviewees ranged from local public figures familiar with public speaking to CETA clients who had never previously spoken “for the record.” Virtually everyone involved was pro-CETA, but interviewers were instructed to elicit critiques of the program.
The quality of the interviews varies greatly. The technical quality of the tapes is often poor, but the content is sometimes quite good. Some interviewers concentrated on the administration of CETA, while others provided a fairly thorough set of interviews on a particular CETA program (e.g., the drug rehabilitation program in River Falls [see Tape no. 5] and the Women's Employment Project in Sturgeon Bay [see Tape nos. 2 and 3].)
Some of the interviews were conducted with two or more people at the same time. Some tapes have two or more people interviewed in succession on the same cassette. Over two-thirds of the interviews have been transcribed albeit often quite roughly. All others have abstracts, keyed either to a recorder's counter or to time.
